Cape Region goes to extremes

Crews in town for television’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition could not have come at a better time.

They’re here to build a new home for a Sussex County ministry dedicated to serving the hungry and the homeless, an effort that has drawn an army of local volunteers working night and day to get the job done.

In the week they have been here, the television crew has seen first hand how the Cape Region responds to people in need.

No sooner had work begun on Jusst Sooup Ranch than Sussex County rumbled with a rare earthquake, centered 200 miles away in Virginia.

Little damage was reported but people in Sussex County took notice; the close call was a reminder that natural calamities can come at any time.

Two days later, as Hurricane Irene was creeping up the East Coast, computer models showed her blasting the Cape Region with the worst storm in decades.

State and local officials prepared for the worst, first asking visitors to leave and next residents living close to the coast.

In a region where locals take a storm warning as a signal the surf will be up – meaning it’s time to get surfboards and margaritas ready – officials had to be concerned that people would confidently ignore the warning.

Miraculously, they listened.

When fierce winds that might have been a tornado tore through a Lewes neighborhood and destroyed a Nassau Station home, no one was home. Its owners had planned to spend the weekend in Lewes, but they listened when the governor said to stay away.

Irene was a highly destructive storm that claimed dozens of lives and left millions without power up and down the East Coast. But not in the Cape Region.

In Rehoboth, as many as 90 percent of residents evacuated. People stayed off the roads and off the beaches – and therefore out of the emergency room – during the worst of the storm.

Then, just hours after Irene passed, volunteers began heading back to work on the new, improved soup kitchen rising out of a Sussex County field.

Irene threatened, but the Cape Region responded.

And it’s the people of the Cape Region who truly put on a show.